Series of Short Stories.....

INTERACTION

One month had passed but the nightmares continued. He would wake up screaming and stare out of the window till sunrise. His dignity taken away and insomnia given in return. As a welcome gift perhaps. For them, it was just healthy interaction. All he longed for now was the day he would become a ‘senior’.


Beginning of a Novel..

“It was not a dark and stormy night, but quite the opposite actually”. Now that was something different, something ‘hatke’- a word used so often by those fat slobs at the publishing houses, that it had inadvertently registered itself at the back of Ruhaan’s head. What did they know about literature- could they even tell apart their Tolstoys from their Bhagats? COMROMISE. That was their crack cocaine. Nothing like an eye- catching sentence to begin a novel. Follow it up with a few pages of Bollywood- style masala and the readers are hooked. Then put in whatever literary rubbish you wish to, who cares. The publisher gets his bestseller and you realize the long cherished dream of your first novel in print.
Oh ! To think of people like them; sitting in their plush, air conditioned offices, thinking of cheap little tricks to sell a few thousand more copies of a book at the expense of Literature; governing the fate of writers like him. It used to drive him mad. But now it only brought a smirk to his face. 7 long years of rejections had finally gotten to him.
With this- “the perfect first line”; he began to write (or rather rewrite) the story of his life, not exactly as he had dreamt.